of Neander, compelled students of the Church Question to make a reëxamination of the terms of their problem. With the freedom of the scholar and the zeal of the prophet, upheld and stimulated by the expressed confidence of his brethren in him, and with a journal whose pages were at his disposal without restriction as to limit, Dr. Nevin addressed himself to his task with an enthusiasm and yet a solemnity which his reader is made to feel in every line. How he makes the days of Cyprian live before us; how he brings us into the very atmosphere of those early ages; how he portrays the true life of the Apostolic Symbol, and turns to our vision the "grand and glorious objectivities of the Christian faith"! A prominent bishop of the Episcopal Church once referred to these as "the palmy days of the Mercersburg Review.'" There was a common and not altogether strange misapprehension that the views and conclusions which Dr. Nevin had come to hold must consistently lead him to Puseyism or to Rome. Men should, of course, have known better, when his utterances on that matter were so very clear and explicit. But it is the common fate of those who do justice to the truth there may be in some other system, to be regarded as traitors to their own and abettors of the enemy. This sort of thing never deterred Dr. Nevin, nor, indeed, did it ever cease to follow him. Within this very year it has come to the knowledge of the present writer that Dr. Nevin was still being charged with disloyalty to Protestantism; and there are doubtless to-day those who regard him as a crypto-papist. But, as we say, Dr. Nevin pursued his course, in the fear of God, and in adoring devotion to the mystery of his Incarnate Son; in this latter he was, indeed, of the very temper and spirit of St. John. This it was that both necessitated his passionate faith in a holy Catholic Church, and at the same time forbade his acceptance of the poor, carnal substitutes which the current ecclesiasticisms had to offer. Thus it was that, similarly to Dr. Frederick Denison Maurice (though the two men are utterly different in temperament as in race), the more he prophesied, the more was he cursed of both sides. Yet there he stood: he could do no otherwise. To deny a Catholic Church, to relegate it to the realm of effete superstitions, as was done by the rationalism of socalled "Evangelical" thinkers, that he could not do without relegating the glorious supernatural fact of the Incarnation thither also. And to make a church by outward aggregation of - units (the old, exploded "social contract" theory in theology), - this all his philosophical postulates made utterly abhorrent to him ; made, again, precisely equivalent to the denial of the church as an object of faith. Or to rest in an invisible church, whose members are all the elect as known to God alone, — elect out of every age and race and clime, this also (well enough in its place) still left unexplained "His Body the Church,” “the fullness of Him that filleth all in all;" in other words, left unexplained the organic connection between the historic incarnate Christ and the new-born society of Pentecost Day. On the other hand, to limit the holy Catholic Church to the obedience of the Pope, or the communion of bishops, might be to believe in a visible, supernatural order: the trouble was, it seemed to him, that that order was not the church; that it was not a body organically one with the Christ, instinct with the life of the glorified Lord, but a mechanical arrangement running alongside the society of the Faithful, to keep that society in order, to preserve truth for it and keep it in touch with Heaven. And to believe in a holy Mechanical Arrangement was to him forever not the same as to believe in a holy Catholic Church. But we are anticipating. Events in the English Church stirred him deeply. He had no patience with those enlightened persons to whom the Oxford movement signified nothing but puerility destitute of all reason. "The movement," he writes in his article on "The Anglican Crisis," "is of far too high and ominous a character, has enlisted in its service far too great an amount of powerful intellect and learning and study, and has gone forward with far too much prayer and fasting and inward spiritual conflict, and has taken hold far too deeply of the foundations of the best religious life of the nation, and has led and is still leading to far too many and too painful sacrifices, to be resolved with any rationality whatsoever into views and motives so poor as those which are called in to account for it by the self-sufficient class of whom we now speak. . . . The main significance of the crisis lies just here, that it goes so thoroughly to the heart and core of the Church Question, and shuts men up to the necessity of answering it in a direct way, if they answer it at all, with full view of what that answer means. The force of the question in the end is nothing less than this: Whether the original Catholic doctrine concerning the church, as it stood in universal authority through all ages before the Reformation, is to be received and still held as a necessary part of the Christian faith, or deliberately rejected as an error dangerous to men's souls and at war with the Bible. We ought to see and feel that this is a question, not for Episcopalians as such only, but for all Protestants. "But the crisis carries with it a sifting efficacy, also, in other directions. It bears with trying severity on the pretensions of Episcopacy, which in England and this country admits either too little or too much for the stability of its own claims. Take the Low Church ground in its communion, and it sinks at once plainly to the order of the sects around it, which have, by their open profession, discarded the proper church theory altogether. . . . It would be far more honest and manly, we think, if the school here noticed, both in England and in this country, would at once forsake Anglicanism as it now stands, and either pass over into the bosom of other denominations, or, if more to their taste, form a new Episcopal sect in open and free fellowship with other sections of orthodox Protestantism." 1 This was certainly a striking prophecy of Reformed Episcopalianism more than a score of years before the event. But let us follow the writer a little farther. "What shall we now say of that other form of Episcopacy which calls itself high only because it is more exclusive in theory as well as practice, and lays greater stress on the legal obligation of its system, while the whole is still taken in the light of a merely mechanical appointment or law? . . . It is possible to take very high ground with this view, to be very aristocratic and very exclusive; but the view itself is low, and proceeds on the want of faith in the proper supernatural character of the church, rather than on the presence of such faith; on which account, the farther it is pushed, it only becomes the more plainly empty and pedantic. "Faith in the church, in the old ecclesiastical sense, is not a stiff persuasion merely that certain arrangements are of divine appointment; it is the apprehension, rather, of the church as a living, supernatural fact, back of all such arrangements, having its ground in the mystery of the Incarnation, according to the order of the ancient Creed. . . . If Episcopacy and a liturgy be found to grow forth conclusively from the nature of the church, in such catholic view, it is all right and good; let them come in for their proper share of respect." 2 In this striking article (from which we regret our inability to 1 Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin, pp. 310, seq. 2 Ibid., pp. 314, 315. quote more) there is much which has the appearance of favoring Rome. It is well that, in the articles on "Brownson's Quarterly Review," Dr. Nevin has left us an admirable criticism of the Roman system. It is too extended an argument to be reproduced here, even in synopsis; but we cannot forbear making a brief quotation : "The theory rests on a wrong conception of what authority is in the world of mind, and so, on a wrong conception of the true nature of the church as the divinely constituted organ and bearer of Christ's will to the end of time. . . This ecclesia docens is no organic product or outbirth of the new creation among believers generally, whom it was appointed to save. Its prophetical, priestly, and kingly functions are not, after all, the activity of Christ's mystical body, actualizing itself as a living body by appropriate organs created for such a purpose. The ministry is to be regarded as a body independent of the church, and it must possess a life of its own; in a word, it is a separate organization of its own, through which the higher powers of Christianity must needs be carried forward, by a wholly distinct channel, for the use of the world from age to age.' ... Again: Again: "As a supernatural constitution, it [the church] must not in any sense conform to the order of nature. It must not be organic, nor historical, nor human, in its higher life; but one long monotony rather of mere outward law and authority, superseding or crushing the natural order of the world, and contradicting it, age after age, to the end of time. The Roman system carries in it thus a constant tendency to resolve the force of Christianity into magic, and to fall into a mere opus operatum in the worse sense."1 If Dr. Nevin thus regarded Romanism as directly contradicting the views and principles which governed all his thinking, what room is there to say or to suppose that he was at heart friendly to it? It may be added, in passing, that Mr. Brownson courteously acknowledged his gratification at having met, in this discussion, an opponent very different from those he commonly encountered. We are becoming painfully conscious of the length to which this paper has already grown, with so much yet remaining to narrate. But we cannot pass over the famous articles on “ Early Christianity," "Cyprian," and "The Apostles' Creed," without at least a word. The upshot of the argument was that early Christianity was a very different thing from modern Protestantism, especially in the so-called Evangelical form, very different, too, 1 Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin, pp. 327, 328. from Anglicanism; that, therefore, the Reformation was not a restoration of Ante-Nicene religion, but that in many things, and those, too, such as are most distasteful to modern American Protestants, the present counterpart of Ante-Nicene religion (so far at least as outward form or embodiment is concerned) is Roman Catholic religion. That, however, the great distinguishing feature of the life of that early church was its high consciousness of the supernatural order of grace which had come into the world by the Incarnation, and was now embodied in the church; and that this faith was not in any such degree a living power to-day, but that to recover it - to make the Apostles' Creed once more truly, deeply, the creed of Christians-would in the end solve the whole question of church unity, and every other question of church life. That, moreover, the peril of modern Protestantism lay precisely in its neglect and dislike of the Creed, and in its corresponding evils of sectism and rationalism, leading, unless checked, to the forfeiture of all consciousness of a supernatural kingdom of grace. Setting forth, with forceful reiteration and amplification, startling propositions like these, he at the same time well guarded his own position by recurring to the attitude of the Reformers toward the Creed, showing especially how Calvin's "Institutes " were structurally built upon its framework; and how, in the milder, more irenic Heidelberg Catechism of his own church, that same venerable Creed was the formative principle, the vital soul. As a matter of course, every striking utterance of this character called forth protest from some paper or journal, and the result was a very thorough discussion of these topics, and the successive restatement of Dr. Nevin's views from some slightly different angle; his contributions appearing in almost every number of the "Mercersburg Review," and being often of great length. The Mercersburg views were from the outset given a more practical direction by being associated with the liturgical movement in the Reformed Church. Nowhere more quickly than in forms of worship will views like these, or their opposites, make their presence felt. The Book of Common Prayer, in its various. editions, is a history of the Anglican Church and of English Protestantism. While the Reformed Church is, historically, a liturgical church, yet under the influences prevalent in this country the consciousness of the fact had been largely lost; and now that the question was before the Synod, it was found that such a conception of the church as had come to be held required a liturgy that should be more than a mere repristination of sixteenth |